Peter laughed.  “Who was with you when you tried the experiment?” he demanded.

Julie threw her head back, and even the professional four glanced up and looked at her.  “Ah, wouldn’t you like to know?” she laughed.  “Well, I won’t tease you—­two native girls if you want to know, that was all.  The rest of the party were having a midday sleep.  But I never can sleep at midday.  I don’t mind lying in a hammock or a deck-chair, and reading, but I can’t sleep.  One feels so beastly when one wakes up, doesn’t one?”

Peter nodded, but steered her back.  “Tell me more,” he said.  “You wake something up in me; I feel as if I was born to be there.”

“Well,” she said reflectively, “I don’t know that anything can beat the great range that runs along our border in Natal.  It’s different, of course, but it’s very wonderful.  There’s one pass I know—­see here, you go up a wide valley with a stream that runs in and out, and that you have to cross again and again until it narrows and narrows to a small footpath between great kranzes.  At first there are queer stunted trees and bushes about, with the stream, that’s now a tiny thing of clear water, singing among them, and there the trees stop, and you climb up and up among the boulders, until you think you can do no more, and at the last you come out on the top.”

“And then?”

“You’re in wonderland.  Before you lies peak on peak, grass-grown and rocky, so clear in the rare, still air.  There is nothing there but mountain and rock and grass, and the blue sky, with perhaps little clouds being blown across it, and a wind that’s cool and vast—­you feel it fills everything.  And you look down the way you’ve come, and there’s all Natal spread out at your feet like a tiny picture, lands and woods and rivers, till it’s lost in the mist of the distance.”

She ceased, staring at her wine-glass.  At last the chatter of the place broke in on Peter.  “My dear,” he exclaimed, “one can see it.  But what do you do there?”

She laughed and broke the spell.  “What would one do?” she demanded.  “Eat and drink and sleep, and make love, Peter, if there’s anybody to make love to.”

“But you couldn’t do that all your life,” he objected.

“Why not?  Why do anything else?  I never can see.  And when you’re tired—­for you do get tired at last—­back to Durban for a razzle-dazzle, or back farther still, to London or Paris for a bit.  That’s the life for me, Peter!”

He smiled:  “Provided somebody is there with the necessary, I suppose?” he said.

“Solomon,” she mocked, “Solomon, Solomon!  Why do you spoil it all?  But you’re right, of course, Peter, though I hate to think of that.”

“I see how we’re like, and how we’re unlike, Julie,” said Peter suddenly, “You like real things, and so do I. You hate to feel stuffy and tied up in conventions, and so do I. But you’re content with just that, and I’m not.”